Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

Only thing is, nobody’s been swinging there in years, far as I can see. The cabin’s door is wide open, and most all the glass has fell out of the windows. The chinking between the logs is out in a lot of places too, so you can look right inside between the cracks.

Still, Pete’s jumping around like he found King Tut’s tomb or something. He goes to the door and actually says, “Hello?” like somebody’s gonna answer him, like the whole Lovin clan is just gonna come out on the porch with banjos and guitars and mandolins and sing him their song.

“Nobody here, Pete,” I say. “Nobody been here for a good number of years.” I push on past him and go inside. It’s a shit pile. Everything’s dusty and smells old and moldy. There’s still some furniture, awful worse for wear, a big old square table with five spindly wooden chairs, all of them homemade, but not good homemade, not like antiques. More like crap wood just thrown together with cheap nails. There are another couple chairs, just as ugly, by a fireplace. There’s an old iron cookstove, there’s a cupboard the shelves have all fell out of, and there’s what’s left of a rope bed at the back of the room, ropes all tore and hanging down. I see a torn cord and what’s left of a cloth curtain on the floor that might’ve made the bedroom a little more private.

There’s a ladder along the side wall that goes up into the attic, and I figure kids must’ve slept up there, but the wood’s all dry and rotten, so I’m not gonna risk it. “So,” I say to Pete, “you think this is the Lovin mansion?”

He nods, like it’s the greatest place he’s ever seen. “Sure of it,” he says, and he heads for the ladder.

“Whoa, hoss,” I tell him. “That don’t look any too safe to me. Besides, it’s gettin’ dark. Let’s wait till morning to look for the hidden gold, okay?”

“You mean it?” he says. “We can stay here tonight?”

“Not here ,” I say, “but in the RV, sure. You brought stuff to cook, right?” Because by now I’m getting real hungry.

He says he did, so we go back to the RV, and it is getting dark, and we trip over some roots but we make it okay. Pete’s got some burgers in the fridge that we fry up, and we have a couple of beers. I try to calm him down a little, tell him that even if this is the old Lovin place, we ain’t gonna find shit, but he doesn’t seem to care.

After we eat, he asks me if I’d sing the song for him, what there is of it, and he’s got a little Martin Backpacker guitar, so I do, and he sits there grinning like a kid. I sing a few more songs, but I’m feeling pretty tired after getting up so early, so we open the RV windows, since it’s a little stuffy, and crawl into our bunks and turn off the lights. It’s dark and quiet, just the sound of bugs chirping, and I fall asleep as quick as that.

When I wake up it’s still dark, and at first I think what I hear is an animal yowling, like a cat in heat. But as I get more awake I realize it’s a human voice, and it’s singing, and it’s just awful, God, like nails on a chalkboard. I sit up and listen, and damned if I can’t make out “‘who wooed me with words so sweet.’”

I get out of the bunk and call Pete’s name, but there’s no answer. I feel around his bunk, but he’s not there. Well, I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I grab a flashlight from where I saw Pete put one, and I turn it on and open the little case I brought along and I get out a.38 revolver I’d brought and I shove it down the front of my pants, reminding myself not to blow my balls off.

That might seem a little extreme, but we’re out there in the middle of nowhere and Pete’s gone, and I don’t know who the hell else is up in these hills. So I go outside and I don’t need the light, because the full moon’s come up over the horizon and it’s plenty bright to see where I’m walking, even with all the trees around.

I get closer to the cabin and see there’s lights on inside. The voice is still singing — it’s up to the part now where they find the dead girl by the creek, and that voice is so weird I gotta look down at the creek to make sure there isn’t a body lying there. Funny thing — even though I got closer to the cabin, the voice didn’t seem to get any louder. It was like I was hearing it inside myself, like distance didn’t have anything to do with it.

When I got to the cabin I didn’t go in the door, but went around to the window instead and just raised my head up over the bottom of the sill. I damn near pissed myself. Pete was in there sitting on that dirty floor, in all the dust and the mouse turds, and sitting right next to him was the ugliest old woman I’ve ever seen. I don’t have much of a gift for words outside of songs, but believe you me, I wouldn’t write any kind of song about that woman. She was like somebody dug her up and barely squirted some juice into her old dry skin. Her hair was dirty gray-yellow, like week-old snow in the gutter, and her eyes were these little black beads that honed into Pete like a hawk on a baby rabbit. There were more lines on her face than there were on Pete’s maps. How ugly was she? Think of the worst thing you can and go a hundred more miles. Then keep driving.

After that first glimpse, I shot my head back down again. Christ knows I didn’t want her looking at me the way she was at Pete. There were plenty of chinks in the wall, and I found one to look through. I felt safer then, though I really didn’t know why that old woman scared me so much. I’d find out. I saw that the light in the cabin was from a few candles, but everything else was the same, and I wondered where the hell that old woman had been keeping herself — up in the attic maybe, or could be there was a cellar with a trapdoor we hadn’t noticed.

By then she was singing the fourth verse, that short one about the gal feeling guilty, and then the chorus. When she stopped, Pete said, “My God, that was beautiful. I’ve heard that song sung hundreds of times, but never like that.”

I thought maybe he was putting her on, because I’d never heard it sung like that neither. But he sounded sincere as could be, and he told her that her voice sounded wonderful. I could see him looking at her like she was an angel, and I wondered what the hell was wrong with him. And then he answered my question for me, or at least I thought.

“Would you sing me the rest?” he says. Bingo, I think to myself— that’s why he’s being so sweet to her. He thinks she’s a Lovin. He’s after the goddam song, that’s all, and if it means telling a crazy old lady she looks like an angel and sings like a bird, old Pete’ll be taping feathers to her arms if he has to.

The old woman doesn’t say a thing at first. She just touches his face with those fingers like old bent twigs, and I wonder how Pete keeps from shuddering. Then she leans in that wrinkled old road map of a face and whispers something in his ear. I can’t hear the words, but it sounds like paper scraping on a two-day growth of beard.

Then Pete nods and be damn if he doesn’t touch her face, lets his fingers trail down her cheek and move over to her lips and then, Jesus Harvey Christ, he kisses her. And I don’t mean like you kiss your grandma. He lays it right on her, open mouthed, and I see something kind of fat and black that I think is maybe her tongue, and man, that’s all I want to see. I look down and take a few deep breaths, thinking about the lengths that people will go to to get what they want, and hoping I never get that desperate.

After I don’t know how long, I look back up, and now, good God, it’s even worse. I mean, he’s doin’ her, right there on the floor. They got their clothes off and he’s on top of her, and I never saw anything like that in my life, it looked like he was trying to screw that thing in the basement in those Evil Dead movies. I near to puked, and I looked away again but I still heard them, Pete panting like he was, I don’t know, in the throes of ecstasy, and that old woman just grunting like a pig, louder and louder till it seemed like something busted inside her, and she let out this howl like some crazy monkey with its tail on fire.